GCSE Business - Teaching from 2025

The GCSE Business qualification will support the Curriculum for Wales by:

• Supporting the statements of what matters by giving learners the opportunity to:
  • gain a deeper understanding of the concepts underpinning humanities, and their application in local, national and global contexts
  • helping learners gather, justify, present, analyse, and evaluate a range of evidence
  • explore how and why interpretations may differ and by critical understanding of a range of interpretations and representations derived from a variety of evidence
  • understanding and appreciating how and why places in their locality and elsewhere in Wales, as well as in the wider world, are changing
  • understand, as producers and consumers, their own impact on the natural world
  • develop their own identity and an awareness of how they, as individuals, can shape the communities in which they live
  • heighten learners’ awareness of how the future sustainability of our world and climate change is influenced by the impact of those actions
  • appreciate how the evolution of places, communities and societies is driven by the interplay between a range of factors, including environmental, economic, social, political and cultural processes and human actions
  • develop an understanding of their responsibilities as citizens of Wales and the wider interconnected world
  • encourage learners to develop as self-aware, informed, ethical global citizens, who critically reflect on their own and others’ beliefs, values and attitudes.

• Supporting the principles of progression by encouraging learners to:
  • ask increasingly sophisticated enquiry questions
  • demonstrate greater independence in finding suitable information, making informed predictions and hypotheses, and making judgements
  • increase their breadth and depth of knowledge and underlying concepts
  • develop an understanding of themselves in the world
  • demonstrate an ability to work with an increasing number and sophistication of sources of information, and a growing understanding of how to resolve contradictory or conflicting accounts
  • demonstrate a growing ability to transfer existing skills and knowledge into new, and increasingly unfamiliar contexts.

• Supporting the subject specific considerations for Business by:
  • developing an understanding of business and its value to individuals, society and the Welsh, national and global economy
  • enabling learners to appreciate that the environment in which business takes place is constantly changing
  • appreciating the impact of business on people’s lives and the environment
  • examining ways in which businesses succeed or fail and the strategies required for success
  • developing an understanding of the contribution that business has in shaping the prosperity of communities and thereby people’s prospects for the future
  • exploring business creation through enterprise and entrepreneurship
  • developing skills to empower business problem solving and decision making.

The GCSE Business qualification will also be based on the following concepts:

• business and society
• business fundamentals
• business strategies for success
• change
• cynefin
• economies
• enquiry and investigation
• enterprise/ entrepreneurship
• ethics
• innovation
• opportunities and challenges